Lost and Wanted(111)

“What did she say?”

“Luv ya,” I said. “I think.”

Jack made a skeptical noise. “Girls are dumb,” he pronounced, before opening the door himself, so that he could better see the car disappearing around the corner.





13.


It was almost as if Charlie died again. I went to my office at MIT, but I hardly got anything done. I brought the photograph of us at her wedding from my desk at home, and I looked at it more and more. My teeth hurt. I thought it was all the coffee I was drinking—but I’d always drunk too much coffee. One day a white balloon floated by the window, and I watched it, transfixed. Where had it come from? It seemed impossible that it had originated from anywhere around Building 6. Vincenzo’s wind chimes—a source of conflict in the past—were beautiful in a way I’d never noticed. Differently sized metal cylinders struck a clay disk, producing a pentatonic scale. Next to those otherworldly sounds, the work in front of me was gray scratches on paper.

    Jack and I didn’t talk much about Terrence and Simmi that summer after they left, but I knew Jack thought about them. Periodically he would drag me outside to weed the garden, according to Terrence’s detailed instructions. Neither of us was good at distinguishing between the weeds and the vegetables he had planted. Once he said, out of nowhere, but as if we’d just been talking about them: “Terrence didn’t have a dad either.”

It was a hot July morning, and we were on our hands and knees, raking a dry bed that Jack swore contained carrots. The shoots coming up looked like chickweed to me, but I pulled out the grass around each plant anyway. Jack used the watering can.

“He had a dad, but his dad didn’t live with them.”

“Did he tell you that, or Simmi?”

“He did.”

“When they were living here?”

“When we were making chili that time.”

“How did he feel about that—I mean, having his dad live somewhere else?”

“He missed him,” Jack said. “But then he saw him, when he was grown-up.”

I waited.

“It wasn’t like he expected.”

“Oh,” I said. “What did he expect?”

Jack nodded, as if that had been his question, too. “He thought they would know each other already.”

“But they didn’t.”

Jack shook his head. “They were strangers.”





14.


Jack turned eight and started the third grade. Vincenzo and I finally published the electroweak paper, which was prominently cited right away, pleasing our department chair and our students. I had a full teaching load again that fall, but my busy schedule didn’t seem to upset Jack the way it had a year earlier; he was more self-possessed and more cheerful than he’d been when he was seven.

Early in December, Addie emailed me to say that Simmi was coming to visit. She was flying on her own, without her father, and Addie wondered if I’d like to set up a time when she and Jack could see each other. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to make good on the promise I’d made them last winter, and take the kids on a lab tour. For me it was also about the political events of that year, which made science education feel more crucial than ever. As I expected, Addie was enthusiastic about the idea, and so I arranged for her to bring Simmi to LIGO’s office on Albany Street, next door to the lab, a little more than a week before Christmas.



* * *



—

It was a cold, gray Tuesday afternoon, and the air had a wet bite that suggested snow. On Albany Street the telephone poles punctuated at regular intervals the brick fa?ades of the labs, formerly warehouse and factory buildings. We waited for Simmi in the courtyard of Building 22, where there was a wooden bench and a few trees, just planted in the spring and now bare. Jack ran up the ramp to the entrance, then gave me an embarrassed smile, returning to the bench via the stairs. I could see him deciding that running up and down ramps was childish.

Simmi and Addie were late, and so we decided to wait in the lobby, where it was warmer. Jack admired the wall-sized posters of the interferometers, and I told him where they were located.

“Which is which?”

“Guess.”

Jack thought for a moment. “I guess that’s Louisiana and that’s Washington.”

    “The other way around.”

Jack looked disheartened. “I thought the desert would be in the south.”

“That’s logical. But it’s the southwest where we have desert in this country; Louisiana is very green. Hanford is more barren, and still pretty contaminated—it was a nuclear facility before LIGO was there. The Department of Energy was working on cleaning it up.”

I thought about the recent changes at DOE, and decided not to mention them. In the past few months Jack has become exasperated with my talking back to the radio. You have to cheer up, he’ll say, or: You can’t be like this for four years! And so I’ve been trying to keep most of my feelings about the news to myself. I’m grateful for the trust and sanguinity Jack displays these days, which makes me feel I’ve done something right. It’s only that, as the world seems to become an increasingly dangerous place, I wonder if happiness is the point. Maybe passion, something that can keep you satisfied inside your own head, independent of other people, is going to be worth more in Jack’s lifetime.